The Colorado Department of Labor and Employment said Wednesday it will “revisit” 150 public schools this summer to ensure they were safely constructed.

The announcement comes one week after state auditors uncovered widespread weaknesses in the inspection system, which allowed students to occupy schools that weren’t built to required safety standards.

“This exercise is to confirm that the schools are safe and specifically address some of the findings in the audit,” said Cher Haavind, spokeswoman for the department.

The department announced it will spend about $160,000 to hire as many as three temporary workers and an outside contractor to conduct inspections and respond to the requests coming into the agency.

“We will not turn a blind eye to the issue of student safety,” said department executive director Don Mares. “This immediate plan allows us to both continue meeting the demands of current and new inspection requests, and to revisit inspections to confirm that students are safe.”

The auditor discovered that most construction projects reviewed by the state had not been thoroughly handled, partly because of inexperienced staff. Department officials blamed a lack of funding.

Among the auditor’s findings were schools with improper fire-protection and structural systems.

The auditor hired a contractor to review 10 building plans. Of those, the contractor found that each project had at least 70 building-code issues.

In one case, a middle-school basement was classified as a crawl space, which did not require an automatic sprinkler system. At one high school, a new gymnasium did not have a firewall connecting it to a covered walkway. At an elementary school, a gym had only two exits when building codes required three.

To hire the workers to conduct the emergency inspections of those and the other sites this summer, the department plans to tap some unspent money and to temporarily increase inspection fees. The auditor found that inspection fees charged by the state were less than fees charged by local governments for inspecting similar projects.

According to the audit, Denver and Aurora would charge about $5,500 for a project valued at $1 million. For a similar project, the state would charge about $1,700.

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